A century after his birth, writer and activist James Baldwin is everywhere

On his 100th birthday, James Baldwin has become a ubiquitous figure. His face will pop up in documentaries, podcasts, books – and beyond those curated commentaries, incarnations on social media. No matter the outlet, though, his words are illuminating, intellectual. They are shards from a sharp-tongued swordsman. 

The late writer has many faces: writer, radical, civil rights activist, orator, a queer man and advocate for gay rights. He is, above all else, remarkably human. His face is beautifully worn. He is confident, he is anxious, he is loving, sitting across from a dear friend, poet Nikki Giovanni.

Baldwin, who was born in Harlem on Aug. 2, 1924, came to embody that storied neighborhood more than any writer since Langston Hughes. His works, which accompanied the rise of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, continue to influence writers and activists to this day.

Two weeks before Baldwin’s birthday, I come across a book I’ve read a number of times, and I buy it again like it’s the first – “The Fire Next Time.”

The book will haunt me a bit this time, because it is penned to Baldwin’s namesake, which is also the name of my maternal grandfather and my brother, both of whom are gone now. “Tough, dark, vulnerable, moody,” were the words Baldwin used early in that letter to his nephew, words that could be used to describe Black men.

Baldwin wanted Black people to love themselves. Take this quote, which snapped me back into focus, when I was doomscrolling on social media the other night:

Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. 

His statement about Black men and perpetual rage adorns my podcast: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.” I smirk at the duality, because the acronym for “Makin’ A Difference” is simply MAD.

Why people need to read more than “The Fire Next Time”

Danté Stewart is a writer and ordained minister with a fiery and fitting first name. “Shoutin’ in the Fire,” Mr. Stewart’s 2021 memoir, invoked Baldwin and led to the Georgia Writers’ Association naming him as their writer of the year. A former football standout, Mr. Stewart has many talents and faces in his own right – athlete, writer, father.

He also wants us to read more than “The Fire Next Time.”

“I think more people should read James Baldwin, particularly, not to lock Baldwin into a certain moment or a certain time, because there’s a thing that happens with our heroes – [they] become stuck in time. So we’re almost reaching back to a past that’s not there anymore,” Mr. Stewart said, when interviewed the day before Baldwin’s birthday, within earshot of his two precocious children. “Baldwin always challenges us to use the past … in such a way that we are able to live in the present.”

Mr. Stewart specifically mentioned “Nothing Personal,” Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He has written about Baldwin extensively, for Time and Oxford American, among other outlets. What shines through for him, as both a writer and minister, is understanding Baldwin’s complexity and humanity.

“There’s this misconception that James Baldwin left his faith [and the church] behind in search of this more liberating thing, which part of that is true. That more ‘liberating’ thing was not leaving [his] faith behind, but reinterpreting it and reimagining it,” Mr. Stewart says. “As I think about the idea of love, as a minister, the beautiful part of faith is that it should be ever growing … coming into deeper knowledge of ourselves and one another. 

“When I think about Baldwin, and I think about my own faith, there’s this deep desire to remain open to the questions of our existence together,” he adds. “That’s what love is.”

Origins of the James Baldwin prize

That love is fostered in the image of a “skinny Black kid” from Baltimore named Lionel Foster. The investor and writer named a scholarship and essay contest in the iconic writer’s honor, the Baldwin Prize.

“Of course, the Baldwin Prize exists because of James Baldwin. That’s the primary reason. But I was motivated to do it because I was a skinny Black kid growing up in communities that had been disinvested and segregated for so long, that it felt like eventually the intent was that we would all just die,” Mr. Foster says in a phone interview. “And this is true of many places in America, not just urban places, but they’re not resourced, they’re not tended to, they’re not respected in a way that gives necessary space for anyone’s humanity.

“And I just had to be a part of changing that.”

Mr. Foster’s urgency was reinforced in the heart-wrenching words of a young essayist regarding the topic of empowerment.

“I remember there was a young woman who told me she had never felt empowered. And I thought, ‘Maybe she’s not all that familiar with the word.’ And she said, ‘No, Mr. Foster, I know what the word means. I’m telling you I’ve never felt it,’” he recalls. “It’s taking what Baldwin did instinctively, a process and a way of showing up in the world that he honed over many years, and creating a program, an infrastructure for hundreds of high school students per year to do a similar type of work.”

What began at Baltimore City College High School in Maryland in 2015 has grown into a project with international contributions – an effort worthy of Baldwin’s legacy as a Renaissance man. Close to 350 students participate in the essay contest, and 100 judges from all over the world provide scoring and insight.

“To go from my experiences as a kid to having some role in a hundred people, some of whom don’t even live in this country. ... All of that goodwill focused on young people in inner-city Baltimore,” Mr. Foster says. “There are people in Germany and parts of Africa devoting hours and saying, you know, these kids matter. What I really want is the students to appreciate how much total strangers love them and to see the kind of space we’re trying to make for them in the world. 

“That’s the Baldwin Prize for me.”